Fought over the weekend at the Airbus Sports & Social club on Deeside. Friday afternoon was spent setting up the terrain for the game and here it is from South (just beyond Eindhoven) to North (Arnhem). Note a few more buildings were added early on Saturday

Veghel

US airborne landing zone (spot the crashed glider)

Horrible swampy group

Waal bridge and canal

Arnhem

I was quite involved with my games, so only a few pictures of the games in progress and other bits and pieces that caught my eye.

Fighting in Veghel

British Paras fighting in the swampy ground (My paras fighting on a Lend Lease basis to Steve B from the club)

XXX Corps in action

Sami's (from Finland) panthers in action

Paras hunting down German armour in Arnhem

I didn't take any pictures of my first game(??), but here's the secoond

A bridge too far! a Brummbar destroyed one of my canal bridges, but luckily I had built a wrecked one.

Some pictures of those very nice paper and foamcore buildings seen in the Battlegroup. Still not convinced that they are robust enough for "normal" wargames use

Day 1 ended wit the Allied players marginally ahead by +3 points. For my games with the US airborne I marginally won the recce scenario in the morning, but then marginally lost the flanking attack in the afternoon. It had been quite an intense day and no chance to look properly at what was going on on the other tables, even the adjacent ones.

Day 2 saw my US airborne in defence of Veghel so here's a picture after my deployment

Things then went rapidly downhill as I was immediately intensively pounded by artillery an lost my single AT gun, which I was hoping to cover the bridge. From then on it was a hold at all costs and by the end I had just managed it. So I managed a marginal win, while the Allies as a whole did badly with the overall score being -4 in the Germans favour so winning them the campaign. So it was again a bridge too far!

Thanks to my opponents Steve, Graham and Guys who were a pleasure to play against.

They don't like multi-player as they get unmanageable. The only knock on effect is if your side loses on an adjoining table you have to immediately take a chit!

We have played larger multi-player games with Battlegroup. For a full days play, about the largest force an average player can cope with is a full company/squadron plus supports. Each player needs to have their own force list and break point, rolling their own orders each turn. You could allocate an overall CO with their own orders dice to roll and allocate as necessary, but probably an additional complication that isn't needed. For a weekends gaming, you'd probably need two or three different battlegroups, so you have reinforcements for day 2 and/or just in case you get something nasty happen, you never know when those big guns will land! Alternatively, what we did was to play individual tables, which formed part of the big picture, but were more like little cameos of a much bigger action.

One of the best ways to play this might be to have a map showing the larger disposition of forces and play out games where the map forces meet - that would certainly make for an interesting campaign and could possibly be organised so individual games were played in different locations/clubs, perhaps with everyone coming together for the big finale.